Spectrum Bridge Partners with Carlson Wireless

Spectrum Bridge and Carlson are working together to provide wireless Internet service providers (WISPs) with gear to reach “last mile” using unused television channels. Carlson’s RuralConnect products are designed to deliver non-line of sight (NLOS) capabilities that can better penetrate foliage than higher unlicensed frequencies such as 900 MHz or 2.4 GHz.

Spectrum Bridge, which maintains a geo-tagged database of television transmitters, is dedicated to working with partners like Carlson to manage TV White Spaces, which require a lookup function to avoid interference with nearby terrestrial television signals. Spectrum Bridge also has partnership with Neul to expand the global deployment of TV White Spaces (TVWS) networks for machine-to-machine (M2M) communications in the UK.

Carlson and Neul worked together to develop RuralConnect, which uses unused portions of UHF spectrum. Itt is designed for use in both the US and the UK. With approval from both the FCC and Ofcom (the UK’s spectrum regulatory entity), the companies plan to introduce the product to the open market by year’s end.

In white spaces radio, each Base Station (BS) would have a GPS receiver which would allow its position to be reported. This information would be sent back to centralized servers (in the USA these would be managed by the FCC), which would respond with available TV channels in the area. Other proposals would allow local spectrum sensing only, where the BS would decide by itself which channels are available for communication. A combination of these two approaches is also envisioned. Channel Bonding uses more than one channel for Tx / Rx.

Unlicensed white space radios would automatically find unused VHF/UHF spectrum and utilize it for multi-point communications, much like long distance Wi-Fi.